Bus Stop!: Technical Report

Abstract

“Bus Stop!” is a proof-of-concept Android application that allows the user to view the live position, capacity and miscellaneous information of busses in a public transport network. The app also gives the user the ability to hail a bus remotely through the use of the app, for situations where the user cannot hail the bus at a stop. For example, the user is outside the line of sight of the bus or multiple busses are pulling into a stop and the user needs to hail one.

This proof-of-concept prototype is powered by a simulation running on the Unity game engine which provides the Android application with public transport data. Short term data (such as bus position, name, assigned route, etc) is transmitted between the Android app and Unity simulation by the PubNub networking service, while long term data (such as bus routes, route waypoints, bus stops) is stored on a PostgreSQL database running on a Sinatra server hosted by Heroku.

While the project was developed to a Minimum Viable Product, it was originally intended to have a much larger scope. The project manages to communicate its idea in its current form, however with more time it would have been able to do this even more so. Nonetheless, great care was put into the design, development and implementation of the project and despite the lack of time to finish it to the original goal, I am very proud of what I accomplished with it.